Introduction

In 2006, in library school, I became interested in wartime publishing. I was taking a book history course and searching around for a topic for my final project. I was interested, at first, in the wartime books that featured advertising on the covers suggesting that once the buyer was done reading the book, it should be sent to the Army to be re-read by soldiers. This led me to the Council on Books in Wartime, an organization that existed basically to solve the problem of reading material for soldiers, and from there I stumbled upon Armed Services Editions. These little books became the topic for my final paper, a Wikipedia article (written primarily because I don’t like to see null searches in Wikipedia), a collection, and eventually I would say a compulsion. I was lucky to be working and taking a class in the wonderful Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, which has a number of these titles in its collection.

I’m not sure how much I will actually blog at this site but I will keep adding content to it as I go, and I will also update my collection list as I add to it–mainly so I don’t accidentally buy too many duplicates. I don’t know how much I can contribute to the conversation, but I do know that these books are too incredible a project to be forgotten, as they seem to be now.

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